51–60 of 157 posts
TIL about Google Map Maker. Just corrected a few issues in my neighborhood, they got approved, I wonder when they get into Google Maps. Anyone knows how long it takes? Google's email sent to me just says "Soon you will be able to see your edit live on Google Maps."
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Apple actually makes this kind of mistake often: they positively excel at some things (retail relationships, hardware supply chains, physical design, software integration) but really suck at other things (social experiences, data harvesting and search, data synchronization and security, dealing with developers): even "within" the Apple community this leads to a number of well-known failures, from Ping (a similar situ…
There's plenty worth criticizing about Apple, but you didn't even mention radar:// 1) "Social Experiences" - Ping failed where... who succeeded? 2) "Data Harvesting and Search" - These are two terms that are either exactly the same, or extremely different. Neither points at a clear criticism. You realize Apple pioneered desktop search, right? 3) "Data synchronization" - Where's the problem, exactly? Is there any comp…
http://www.powayiliad.com/2011/01/itunes-ping-an-apple-failu...
http://www.buzzfeed.com/scott/ping-fail-5-reasons-to-avoid-j...
Even Apple considers Ping a failure, so I'm really not certain where you are trying to go with your argument.
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/technology-blog/apple-declares-p...
2) Apple is fairly good at doing things on the desktop, however their server work leaves much to be desired: the way they attempt to rank search results in their various online store fronts is a commonly cited example of this. I have explicitly been told by people at Apple "we are not server people" when reporting issues. (Also, "harvesting" is the collection of data, and "search" is the process of finding data you need in the massive pile you have collected: these are orthogonal concepts.)
3) There are so many issues with this that there is a small industry surrounding tools and teaching people hacks to make this work correctly; I'm kind of assuming you have sufficient context in the Apple community to know much about the specific issues, which is why I felt it was perfectly acceptable to just list "known failures" rather than having to say "this is how why this one failed".
http://www.maclife.com/article/howtos/how_solve_all_your_mob...
http://www.cultofmac.com/82971/how-to-fix-mobileme-sync-prob...
http://www.google.com/search?q=+site:discussions.apple.com+m... (12,600 results)
4) You realize who you are talking to, right? Do I really need to defend this? The sheer fact that I have been, for years, operating what is probably the largest private-sector man-in-the-middle attack ever (many tens of millions of devices worldwide, literally billions of stored signature blobs), on Apple's products, an attack that would be trivially solvable by techniques literally taught in intro-level encryption classes, should be sufficient (but of course when you do what I do you have tons of stories to tell).
5) I haven't had this happen to me, as I don't use iCloud: this has happened to numerous other people, however. Here is one example user (of many), from May, with the non-saurik names changed:
--- Day changed Tue May 29 2012 01:04:34 this iCloud shit is getting ridiculous 01:04:59 xxx: ? 01:05:16 saurik: I upgraded my phone, but my iCloud backup was 7GB, i've spent the last two days straight trying to restore it 01:05:38 (if the download is interrupted for one second, it fails, and there is no download resume or anything similar or way to download to iTunes or anything) 01:05:50 and on my slow internet, 7GB takes about 13 hours to download 01:06:10 ouch 01:06:20 I backup everything minus the Camera Roll, so my backups stay small. If I update, I use iTunes for a one off backup/restore. 01:06:56 yeah; i should have disabled the camera roll 01:07:33 saurik: I don't think it fails if the screen doesn't turn off, so right now I'm sitting with it for the ~9 remaining hours on my 7th attempt tapping the screen. 01:07:35 However, the backup I made before upgrading to 5.1.1 turned out to be corrupt (wtf?) so I had to restore from iCloud minus Camera Roll. 01:07:46 lmrpq: how do you restore minus camera roll?? 01:07:50 oh, iTunes backup 01:08:02 i want to restore from iCloud without camera roll, for maybe ~500mb 01:08:08 No, my iCloud backups don't have camera roll, so I had to do that 01:08:12 hmm 01:08:15 I was not happy. 01:08:19 maybe i could finish setup 01:08:20 jailbreak it 01:08:26 remove the "setup finished" flag 01:08:32 hook into the setup script 01:08:41 skip parts of the download 01:08:45 : hmm maybe i could also go somewhere with > 10mbps internet 01:09:37 Apple has a lot of money. I wish they put some of it into making stellar cloud services. 01:11:18 xxx: what kind of device? 01:13:03 ah, I'm going to resume 4S? (as you said iphone) 01:13:47 yaeh 01:13:55 I guess its time for the drinking bird --- Day changed Wed May 30 2012 00:07:33 iCloud restore failed. 00:07:37 :( 00:07:42 time to start again!
The best part of the entire report (which you will note was still plaguing this user a day later, as near the end the timestamps reset for May 30th):
00:42:52 all i really want is my chrono trigger save game :(
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This is the first event that people will put down to a lack of Steve Jobs that I think actually might reflect that...
Would Jobs have the balls to release iOS 6 with no Maps at all for a year or more while they scramble to catch up? Those would be some huge cajones.
- try to make the deal with Google happen; Apple has so much money it's hard to understand why they couldn't buy their way into Google Maps for another year or two
- make a deal with someone else (Microsoft / Bing Maps, other map provider) while still working on their own, in-house solution
It's great that Apple decided to build its own map system; the problem is they released it when it was far from ready; Apple didn't use to present half-baked products to the world.
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Is this true though? It's easy for everyone for all the armchair CEOs to say that Jobs never would have released such an epic fail, but I'm not so sure. If there's one thing that Apple hates as much as a half-baked UX, it's dependency on another tech company. It seems pretty obvious to me as a casual developer and observer of Google maps over the years that global mapping is really really hard. How could Apple not ha…
Are Bing Maps this horrible? Couldn't they license those if they didn't have a choice? Or what about MapQuest? What about the maps used by GPS units? Couldn't they have made a deal with Garmin or Tomtom or someone like that? It may have taken more work than integration with Google, but it'd almost definitely take less work than starting from scratch. I definitely do not believe that their hands were tied and they wer…
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I thought Apple did have a relationship with Tomtom for this?
Yes, you're apparently right: http://www.engadget.com/2012/06/11/apple-tomtom-ios-6-maps/ I'm not sure what all that deal entails, so it's hard to say whether it could have been better executed upon, other than to say it's clearly not ready yet. I find it hard to believe, however, that all of the incorrect placement of destinations and, in some cases, even the inclusion of destinations that have not existed for decad…
"[Apple's] problem is that they thought they did not have a problem." Crucial insight, there. From the perspective of an observer who has no special affection for Apple, it's surprising that a company of that competence would succumb to such a basic process error.
What insight?
Apple makes most of their stuff themselves -- or gets them from multiple sources.
Maps were an exception, as a key technology that was in the hands of a competitor.
But not because Apple could help it at the time: they made a foray into a new territory, mobile phones, and Google had all the available technology and was a non competitor at the time (the first Android phone was out a year later, Oct 2008).
It's a few years that they have already started the process of moving to something of their own. They bought some mapping companies, etc. Something forced their hands to make the switch before that was over.
In any case, you can't just jump over 8+ years of refinements that Google maps have (not to mention all the "driving endless miles for Google Street View and road info, etc).
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There's plenty worth criticizing about Apple, but you didn't even mention radar:// 1) "Social Experiences" - Ping failed where... who succeeded? 2) "Data Harvesting and Search" - These are two terms that are either exactly the same, or extremely different. Neither points at a clear criticism. You realize Apple pioneered desktop search, right? 3) "Data synchronization" - Where's the problem, exactly? Is there any comp…
1) Many other companies have succeeded at getting social to work: Ping did not; do you use Ping? I explicitly go into the story with regards to Ping. I know of no one who considers Ping a success. http://www.powayiliad.com/2011/01/itunes-ping-an-apple-failu... http://www.buzzfeed.com/scott/ping-fail-5-reasons-to-avoid-j... Even Apple considers Ping a failure, so I'm really not certain where you are trying to go with…